5 Ways to Automate Your Pinterest Marketing Strategy

Ignoring Pinterest is no longer an option. But neither is ignoring Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or your blog. How can you add Pinterest to the marketing mix without consuming even more of your time and resources on a daily basis?

How to Automate your Pinterest Strategy

Start by seeding your boards with amazing content. Check out some of the most popular boards for ideas and inspiration. Don’t just focus on your specific niche. Try to find aspects of your niche that apply to the general public. For example, if you are an internet marketing business, you may want to search out and pin marketing infographics or how-to images.

1. Auto Follow

Use a Pinterest Automation Software that automatically follows lots of other users. You can set it and forget it while it automatically finds hundreds of people to follow. As you know, many people will follow you back!

Software like NinjaPinner is a good option. ONLY use the Auto-Follow feature. I do NOT recommend using any of the other features. Once you start on a relevant board, the system will navigate to other relevant boards and automatically follow boards and people. This is entirely acceptable as it doesn’t require any actual interaction.

Other features, like auto-pin or auto-comment could easily show a footprint and make it obvious that you are using an automated system. You do not want the system to be your voice, simply to speed up something that requires no “brain power”.

2. Schedule Pins

Instead of having to spend time every day adding pins, use Pingraphy to schedule your Pins, just like you do with your Tweets and Facebook updates.

Start by creating an album of pins you like. In order to give proper attribution, I recommend copy and pasting the URL’s into a notepad or Evernote so that you can have quick and easy access to the URL’s.

Once you navigate to the page with the image that you’d like to pin, click on the “Pingraphy” bookmarklet in your browser bar. Pingraphy will automatically look for all images on the page.

You can select the images that you’d like to Pin, and then click on “Next”.

Next you select the board where you want your images to go, as well as a description and URL for each of the images. Make sure you use relevant keywords for each of the images!

You can schedule your pins with an interval of 1440 minutes so that the system will add 1 pin per day. Depending on your niche, you may want to pin faster or slower. For example, in dry niches where it’s hard to find images, once a day may be enough. In other niches where photographs are easy to find, you may choose to pin 2 or 3 images per day.

5. Display your Pins on your site

Most people know to add a Pin It button to all of their images so everyone can add blog images to their Pinterest accounts. But what if you pin images directly to Pinterest or from other sources?

Use the Pinterest RSS WordPress Plugin to display your Pinterest Pins on your website to encourage more pins and engagement with your Pinterest account.

A Sample Pinterest Marketing Schedule

Now let’s put all of these tools together into a methodology. As with all social platforms, Pinterest is about engagement. You cannot fully automate Pinterest as you would be completely missing the point – connecting with others. You have to return to the platform often to connect with people and comment on pins.

Here’s a sample schedule that can be implemented once a week for about 1 hour:

Spend 30 minutes on Repinly to gain ideas of images to pin

Open an evernote where you post links to all of the pages with images that you want to Pin

Use Pingraphy to schedule pins for the next 7 days

Visit Pinterest and find 15 people with great pins and comment on their pins

Open NinjaPinner and have it auto-follow people

By following these 5 steps, you will be able to grow your Pinterest account a little bit every week. If you do your reserach well and pin interesting images, you’ll grow faster as people repin your images, which exposes you to their audience.

Whenever someone repins or comments on your pin, you will get a notification from Pinterest. Be sure to thank them and comment in order to create a genuine connection.

That’s it! You’re done for the week! The following week, rinse, lather and repeat!

About the Author: Marcela De Vivo writes for Gryffin Media, sharing tips and tricks to create Social SEO campaigns that lead to both traffic and engagement. Her passion is to find new ways to improve internet marketer methods and to help others improve.

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Great post Marcela. We’re currently fleshing out our content marketing campaign and will be starting it in Feb. with an infographic. For someone who isn’t involved on Pinterest at all, this is a good beginners guide and something I’ll find time to do between now and Feb. to beef up our presence.

Nice list of ideas to automate pinterest marketing and the tools to get it done. Thats a great way to go Travis. I surely agree with you, Infographics can get more engaging people to the site, make them share and spread the word. Monica you might have forgot to talk about the recipes on IFTTT to cross post the images from places like tumblr, facebook page etc to a particular pin board on pinterest.

Hi Rank Watch, as far as I’m aware, IFTTT doesn’t support Pinterest? Is there another tool/way to do this? There are WP Plugins that will take your WP featured image for every post and pin it to Pinterest, but I cant find any recipes or ways of creating recipes to automate Pinning using IFTTT.

Hi Marcela. This is excellent. I have an online puzzle site and I feel that Pinterest is a great social place to be but wasn’t quite sure how to use it to the best advantage. Your five tips are pure gold. I’m pinning this to my board right now! I plan to take time and put each tip into action. Awesome.

Thanks for sharing these automation tips! At our agency we use Pinterest for our clients as well as for our personal interests (one of my coworkers had 1.5 million followers on his men’s fashion board). It’s been an interesting challenge, figuring out how to optimize Pinterest for brands and reach other pinners to empower them to be brand advocates. The tips you’ve given sound like they’d go a long way in helping streamline that process, especially creating a detailed marketing schedule (never considered that before!).

Great post on the automation – I like Pinterest but feel I get lost looking through all the pins and end up spending more time on the site than I should. Definitely worth investigating for the coming year. Thanks for the info!

Hi Rebecca, I use Task Timer, a Chrome app, when I’m on Pinterest. I give myself a certain amount of time, and when the time is up, the Task Timer alerts me, so I am sure to quit. Otherwise, I would also spend WAY too much time on Pinterest, I love all of the things that can be discovered!

Pinterest is the last social network came on the market,but is growning very fast and a lot of people like it,so I think that marketing on pinterest is a good idea,for direct traffic too,but doesn’t help seo(no longer) because links are “nofollow”.
So I think there is not a “best”,because facebook,twitter,and pinterest are different kind of social network ,they have different method to be used,and different method for the user to get/post news.
Good job

Hello, can please anyone help to automate pinterest the same was this guy did in a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVdMeg2N8cM – the way he commented, liked and repinned posts automatically? Is that possible?

Good post and well written as always! I am a regular reader of your blog posts and I always get to learn something new from your blog. Thanks for sharing! Similar is I get to learn from “BrandHarvest” expert team’s blog, which is a best brand agency.

Well if some one don’t have time to schedule Pins and don’t want to waste time by entering pins manually the user’s can use Pin It chrome extension. This extension automatically fetch Image as well as URL you just need to add keywords if you want. That’s it.

Hi, I’m knew to this, so maybe I’m missing the point, I hope some one can help me out. What is the point of adding lots of other people’s pins and growing your followers? How do we get them to see your products and your pins in order to get conversions? Also what the point of leading people from you blog to pinterest shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Sorry if the questions sound very amateur, like I said I knew to all this and there’s much to learn and understand with the hundreds of social networks and everything else, it’s just complete over saturation

Hi! Thanks so much for writing about Pingraphy in the past. We’re now called Viraltag and have added some great features for visual content marketing. We’re also happy to tell you Viraltag is now running on Pinterest’s API. With the new data we’re building more functionality to make Viraltag an even more powerful platform for our users. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me directly — Jilly Badanes, Director of Marketing @ Viraltag.

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